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Michael Urie holds up Barbra Streisand's book, "My Passion for Design" during his one-man hit, Buyer & Cellar, that starts the Off Broadway on Flora, at Dallas City Performance Hall in Dallas TX Sept. 3, 2014.

Patti LuPone, the two-time Tony Award-winner, who will be bringing her one-woman show Coulda Woulda Shoulda…played that part to Oklahoma Saturday to benefit Oklahoma City Rep, will soon be co-starring with Plano native Michael Urie in Show for Days, a new comedy about a crazed community theater star, according to Associated Press and Variety.

The show begins previews June 6 and opens June 29 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater.

The script is by Douglas Carter Beane, the Tony Award-nominated playwright of The Nance, The Little Dog Laughed, Sister Act and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, which heads to Dallas Summer Musicals June 9-21 and Bass Hall in Fort Worth June 23-28.

Urie, who attended Collin College and starred in television’s Ugly Betty and Off Broadway’s Buyer and Cellar, presented by the AT&T Performing Arts Center in September, will play the show’s narrator. Dale Soules, a veteran of Hands on a Hardbody, written by Dallas’ Doug Wright, will play a member of the theater troupe that LuPone’s character rules with a firm hand. Jerry Zaks directs.

Continue the conversation on D-FW Theater on Facebook and on Twitter @nchurnin.

Some sing about the man that got away. Patti LuPone sings about the shows that got away in Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda… Played That Part, her one-woman show.

Check out this week’s top five theater picks, which features the two-time Tony Award-winner in her Oklahoma debut, the Out of the Loop Fringe Festival at WaterTower Theatre, The Lady With All The Answers at One Thirty Productions, Fellowship!: The Musical Parody of The Fellowship of the Ring at Theatre Three and And Then There Were Noneat Theatre Britain.

Continue the conversation on D-FW Theater on Facebook and on Twitter @nchurnin.

Above: For those who missed Saturday night’s brilliant Patti LuPone/Mandy Patinkin show at the Eisemann Center in Richardson, here’s a taste of it from when the two performed the show on Broadway last fall. (SOURCE: Playbill Video/YouTube)

Anyone who still thinks that Dallas can’t compete on a world-class level in terms of the arts wasn’t paying attention this weekend. I had a personal three-day festival of performing-arts delights that started with Broadway’s War Horse on Thursday at the Winspear Opera House (it runs through Sept. 23), continued with the marvelous Sarah Jaffe at the beautiful new Dallas City Performance Hall on Friday and ended with a theatrical bang that I’ll never forget: the unbelievably brilliant Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin at Richardson’s Eisemann Center on Saturday night.

The crowd at the Eisemann was justifiably in swoon mode from beginning to end. LuPone and Patinkin obviously share a great love and respect for one another, and it seemed to bleed into their feelings for the audience, and vice versa. They stopped the show at one point to applaud the audience and the Eisemann for giving them the idea for what’s now called An Evening With Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin — they first did the show 10 years ago to open the facility, and since then have performed it (refined and reshaped through the years) all over the world and on Broadway. This show celebrated the Eisemann’s 10th anniversary.

“We’ll do this together till we drop dead,” Patinkin vowed, setting things up nicely for the 20th anniversary in 2022. “You gave us a great gift.”

Patinkin said that when the Eisemann folks first approached him and LuPone, they described the facility as “sort of our Lincoln Center.” “I don’t know why they’d say that — this is better than any theater in Lincoln Center!” he declared.

They kicked off the show with one of the hardest numbers in musical theater, “Another Hundred People” from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Highlights included more Sondheim, along with tunes from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jerome Kern, John Kander and Fred Ebb, and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. It was truly a theater geek’s dream evening, with those amazing voices and that sterling lineup of music.

The two Tony winners, who co-starred in Evita on Broadway more than 30 years ago, have gone from great to magnificent with age. LuPone’s soprano is still as crystalline and powerful as when she played Fantine in the original staging of Les Miserables, and Patinkin’s haunting tenor, so well-known from Sunday in the Park With George, has retained its purity but also gained depth and gravitas.

LuPone brought the house down with her rendition of “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” from Gypsy, and Patinkin followed with a bravura, startling performance of “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues” from Follies. Of course, the out-of-our-seats, clap-so-hard-our-hands-hurt showstoppers were their numbers from Evita. Patinkin started it off with the pounding, accusatory Oh What a Circus, followed by LuPone’s fragile, pleading Don’t Cry for Me Argentina. In the space of a second, the audience went from wild, standing-O elation at Patinkin to pin-drop reverence for LuPone.

Simply lit amid a bevy of theatrical ghost lights — single bulbs in caged stands, traditionally left on theater stages when the rest of the room is dark, for safety’s sake — the duo gloriously played against type with lengthy sequences from South Pacific and Carousel, and made us laugh till we cried while doing a rolling office chair pas de deux (complete with seated high kicks) during “April in Fairbanks” (from that well-known hit, New Faces of 1956, by Murray Grand). They were backed beautifully by music director-pianist Paul Ford and bassist Carl Hillman.

After the show, Patinkin and LuPone attended a reception with Eisemann staffers and supporters, and reiterated their love for Richardson. Back at ya’, you two. Do we really have to wait another 10 years for an encore?

I promised a dear friend of mine that I would see her in A Little Night Music. Even though I had seen the production in London last May and left at intermission because of my silly desire to hear Sondheim’s songs sung correctly (i.e. hitting all the notes, even the high ones), I wandered over to the Walter Kerr Theater to shell out my hard-earned money.

A well-dressed and quite savvy older woman stood in line a few people ahead of me (yes, a line! in a box office!) and told the man at the window that she only wanted to see the show if Angela Lansbury and Catherine Zeta Jones were performing. I, being a person who works backstage, felt twinge of annoyance about their poor understudies, but then realized that I too would only want to see the show if the stars were ‘in’ at the performance.

This got me thinking about star power: who has it, who has earned it and who hasn’t, and who gets shows on Broadway because of it.

Places has been called. The actors are poised and ready for the show to begin. The house lights dim. A voice cuts the darkness with a message to the audience. “Please turn off your phones. The taking of photos and videos is not permitted during the performance. Enjoy the show.”

Almost immediately, the curtain rises and a flash goes off. A baby starts to cry. An old man has a coughing fit. Two latecomers try to get to their seats in the middle of the second row.

The actors play the scene as though there is indeed a fourth wall separating them from the crowd. But they see and hear everything going on in front of them. It’s called live theatre for a reason, people.Continue reading →